The article analyzes macroeconomic forecasts of tax revenue in the Czech Republic. Forecasts are tested for their biases on data from Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. The authors argue that Czech tax-revenue forecasts were highly biased and the hypothesis of unbiasedness could not be rejected...

The Stability and Growth Pact has become a primary fiscal policy framework in all European countries since 1997. Together with Maastricht fiscal criteria it determines the fiscal discipline of integration process. The aim of this study is to evaluate ex-post effectiveness of the fiscal rules...

The author of this paper criticizes the broad, cash-flow based concepts of seignorage that were introduced and emphasized by the economic literature of the 1990s (i.e., fiscal seignorage, total seignorage, etc.), which the author argues are ill justified and confusing. On the other hand, the two...

It is well known that in EMU the degree of similarity in the composition of current expenditures is relevant since the way Member States are affected by external shocks depends at least in part on this composition. In the 8 postsocialist countries recently admitted to the EU (EU-8) the mean...

In the last years there has been a growing discrepancy between gross domestic product and gross disposable income (more than a double of government budget deficit in 2006)in favour of non-residents. The difference between the real interest rate and the rate of growth of GDP has been negative in...

The paper examines implications of both real and nominal convergence for a fully-funded pension system. The process of convergence implies that higher contribution rates are necessary in the converging economy for replacement ratios to be the same as in a steady-state economy. This effect in the...

Non-contributory periods is one of the key issues in the public discussion on the planned reform of the pension system in the Czech Republic. This article focuses on a detailed analysis of non-contributory periods in the Czech pension system and their impact on pension system balance and micro...

The paper deals with a wide-spread myth that a switch from a PAYG to a funded pension system might solve adverse consequences of the population aging. It is shown, that under additional assumptions the pension debt (which is created during the process of the switch) is exactly equal to the value...

The Czech Republic is going to face ageing of its population. It will affect the economy in many ways. The pension system is one of them. This paper provides a view on possibilities how to insure long-term stability of the pension system in the Czech Republic using a mix of pay-as-you-go and...

This essay focuses on the pension system and highlights some of its key elements. The first part deals with the economic principles connected with the social security system. Eatwell's model is utilized to give some basic intuition of terms and concepts used in the pension reform discussion. The...